One more chance!  The blind, infatuated man remains on his back.  Again the horse feels the stings of his deadly persecutors; again he plunges forward, striving to turn quickly round the corner.  Round, and he is in comparative safety.  On a sudden, from behind a buttress of projecting rock, there start across the path three dusky forms, flinging their hands wildly in the air.  Then was heard that rare and awful sound, the shriek of a horse in the fear of a certain and coming death; when swerving one side, he lost his footing on the slippery shelf, and struggling madly, but unsuccessfully, to recover it, he fell over and over—­down—­down—­a thousand feet down!  From the sailor’s lips there came no cry.

[Illustration:  GEN.  COFFEE’S ATTACK ON THE INDIANS.]

MASSACRE OF FORT MIMMS.

On the 30th of August, 1813, Fort Mimms, which contained one hundred and fifty men, under the command of Major Beasely, besides a number of women and children, was surprised by a party of Indians.  The houses were set on fire, and those who escaped the flames fell victims to the tomahawk.  Neither age nor sex was spared; and the most horrible cruelties, of which the imagination can conceive, were perpetrated.  Out of the three hundred persons which the fort contained, only seventeen escaped to carry the dreadful intelligence to the neighboring stations.

This sanguinary and unprovoked massacre excited universal horror, and the desire of revenge.  The state of Tennessee immediately took active measures for punishing the aggressors.  General Jackson was ordered to draft two thousand of the militia and volunteers of his division; and General Coffee was directed to proceed with five hundred mounted men to the frontier of the state.  The former, having collected a part of his force, joined General Coffee on the 12th of October, at Ditto’s landing, on the Tennessee.  They then marched to the Ten Islands, in the same river.  A few days afterward, General Coffee was detached with nine hundred men to attack a body of the enemy, posted at Tallushatchee.  He arrived early in the morning within a short distance of it, and, dividing his force into two columns, completely surrounded it.  The Indians, for a long time, made a desperate resistance, and did all that was possible for men to do who were in their situation.  But they were finally overpowered, with the loss of one hundred an eighty-six men.

THE FRESHET.

The freshet at Bangor, Me., in the spring of 1846, is thus described in “Forest Life and Forest Trees:”